I’ve had some requests for ‘more about bread’ so I’m going to try and describe the whole process.  We make bread with sourdough as the leaven.  A sourdough culture is a symbiotic relationship between a wild yeast and a bacteria, working together to consume the nutrition in grain and prevent colonization by competing yeasts and/or bacteria.  If you go to a real bread baker with a clean Mason jar they’ll almost always give you some starter, or they can be purchased from http://www.sourdo.com (heartily recommended).  One’s starter is a constantly fluctuating population and must be managed to create the right conditions to make bread.  I keep the culture in a wide mouth one quart jar in the fridge.  It has about three cups in it, half water, half flour.  It is refreshed every time I bake and then put in the fridge to slow it’s activity.  After a week it will have reached it’s population peak, consumed almost all of the nutrients in the flour and subsided, leaving 1/2 cm of liquid on top.  Before bed I discard two thirds of this and stir in a cup of water and a generous cup of flour, vigorous stirring to whip some air into it.  Back to the fridge overnight.  Now the yeasts, given air and fresh food, start reproducing rapidly.  By morning it will be expanded and full of bubbles but not yet resettled.  One wants to throw it at the dough when it is on the way up, still creating new yeast population.

In the morning I mix a cup and 1/2 to two cups of the starter with 3 cups of water and 9 of flour, including whatever whole grains or adjuncts are going in.  Lately I like a generous cup of rye flour for flavor and texture.  Also a tablespoon of sea salt.  This dough is kneaded for at least ten minutes until well conditioned.  In a large bowl I toss the ball of dough in 2T of olive oil.  Cover well with plastic wrap in put in a warm place, proofing box or gas oven with a pilot (that’s what I have and the usual temp is 100F).  In three hours it will have more than  doubled.  Once again you want to catch it on the way up, before it subsides.

I form it into three large loaves.  These get spread into long flats and are slapped against the counter, then folded to reform a loaf.  I usually do this twice, stretching in the same direction to develop texture and create a protein skin that will contain the CO2 given off by the yeast in the second rise and constrict the rising into a round loaf.  The loaves are placed in bread pans painted lightly with olive oil, covered with plastic wrap or the more traditional damp towel, and given another one and a half to two hours in the proofing box.  I make a one cm. slice down the center of the loaves and bake for 10 minutes at 420F and 30 to 50 at 320F.

Our current culture is a San Francisco type and benefits from the warmth and speed of the above method.  In the past we’ve used a French levain culture with very different characteristics that really enjoyed a long cool rise.  In these symbiotic relationships the yeasts multiply first and when enough of them are digesting they change the chemistry of the mix and the bacteria multiply, creating the ‘sour’ part of the flavor profile.  The longer the reaction time, the less the lift and the more the sour.  Whatever culture you use you will find it’s rate of reaction and build your own routine around it.  Buen provecho!

Bees reproduce by swarming, by making new colonies. A new individual bee is nothing without a colony. When a colony is doing well enough to fill its home they start to change their roles. The queen lays eggs in specially prepared queen cells. When they are sufficiently advanced, usually about ten days, the workers stop feeding her and she gets smaller and restless. At some point she takes about half the colony and leaves to find a new home while the ones left behind nurture the new queens, one of which will take over the egg laying task.

Beekeepers use this to make new colonies on their own schedule. We watch the spring build-up and then step in to make artificial swarms. So I’m out there opening giant bee boxes completely full of bees. I find the queen and set her aside. Then I make one or two, sometimes three new colonies from the brood (pupating worker bees) and honey, move them a couple of miles away so the workers don’t find their way back to the old location and put a new queen in them, usually in the form of a queen pupa supplied by a queen dealer with a specified hatching date.

Finding the queen in a box like that pictured above ain’t easy, can you see her? It takes an unusual level of concentration and awareness, the smell of fresh nectar all around, the buzz of a disturbed colony, the occasional sting and distractions like keeping track of the stage of the honey flow, pollen levels and keeping an eye out for pathologies.

This makes for hard work, especially because it usually goes on in a heavy honey flow. The frames are full of nectar, your gloves get sticky and full of stings and the usual structure of the hive is disrupted by all the honey coming in; the queen can be in all kinds of places she might not ordinarily be as she looks for new places to lay. One holds frame after frame at the right angle to scan it for the queen, making mental notes of the strength of the hive, the location of pollen and brood, trying not to think about the wonderful spring going on all around, the wrens, warblers and vireos singing and whether there might be snakes hiding under the pallet.

Up in Virginia my brother took a fine series of photos of this immature bald eagle.  It appears to be honing in on some litter but realizes it’s been had and flies away.

Where are the bees?

Beekeeping is so far outside the normal experience of most people that I get a lot of boneheaded naive questions.  The most common, by far, is;
“Do you get stung?” which I’ve answered here.  Other popular queries include;”How do you get them to go on the truck?” This last weekend we were getting a load ready to go out to pollinate almonds in California.  Half of the commercial bee colonies in America go to the almonds and these belong to a friend and business associate of mine that sent them here to enjoy our balmy winter in preparation for their trip to the Central Valley.  California has strict rules to prevent the introduction of fire ants and we pressure washed all the pallets and hives to make sure the load didn’t get sent back.  The bees were all lined up, ready for the big truck to pull in when a retired couple stopped in to buy a jar of honey.  They drove in the truck driveway and right by 400 colonies (see photo above).  When they found their way to our back door they bought their jar and then asked, “Where are the bees?”  I guess they expected little hornet nests hanging from the trees.

There was about 15 pounds of chicken food, presumably brought there two little cheek pouches at a time plus the feathers, muscadines and upholstery you see.  Whatever rodent went to all this trouble it appears to have not enjoyed the fruits of its labors, indeed I suspect it made a snack for ‘The Sandman’.  mmmm, grain-fed rat.  On the whole I think I prefer the snakes; they keep the drawers nice and clean.

Here’s something a little nicer, mid-winter camelias.

And: The Sandman

Don't pants me bro!

Hence two ferrets in your pants: not bad.  Two squirrels in your pants: probably not bad.  Once again, Audubon claims they can be ‘trained to the hand’ in less than half an hour.  He doesn’t say anything about ‘trained to the pants’ but I’d be optimistic.

A ferret and two flying squirrels in your pants: watch out.  Nightmare on Limb Street?  Halloween VII: The Squeekening?  Weasel Dead?

A couple of weeks ago I’d heard a rumor of a bear in our woods but thoroughly discounted it as local fabulosity.  Not so!  One of the yards we looked at while setting out the new bees had been visited by a bear and bashed up a bit.  So driving all through the woods to look at the others to see where else he’d been took some more time (only one other yard got hit).  An old-timer once told me that bears here are mostly in transit from Okefenokee to Penholloway Swamp and I believe that.  This high sand ridge doesn’t have enough forage to support bears and the crowds of hunters that lease the land would be discouraging to any critter.  Hopefully this one is gone and won’t be back.

Just about the only benefit associated with Ellen’s job that hasn’t been eliminated in ongoing cost cutting is the Xmas turkey and I cured it and smoked it with some success the day after Christmas.  Seven hours at 150F over oak gave it a delicate smoke flavor that balanced with the honey/salt cure really well.  I didn’t leave the gravy out this time in case of more owls (see previous entries).  The cat has been leaving the owls alone and concentrating on flying squirrels (again, see below).  One of them I did catch in my pajamas, it ran right up my leg until my jumping up and down and yelping got it out again when I grabbed it and let it go outside.  He brought another one in last night and I let him eat it because we suspect that he’d been catching the same one over and over and they were developing a dysfunctional relationship.

Yesterday I spent covered with hydraulic oil trying to fix the Bobcat.  It required contortions and the usual knuckle busting and wasn’t exactly fun but the beautiful sunshine, flocks of bluebirds and waxwings and warm gentle breezes made it better than it could have been.  I actually may be able to fix it.  I hope 10W30 is good for one’s youthful complexion because I’ve been soaking in it.

The picture is the birthday boy, our friend Brad, holding a marbled godwit earlier on Saturday showing how the new tracking device sits (comfortably we hope) just behind the wing.

Georgia oysters are rarely seen in commerce.  Long, thin and very sharp they fuse together into big clumps.  This makes the size sorting necessary for retail difficult and the shells will cut you.  Their flavor is worth the risk though, rich, round and salty.